Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey holds a
Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century
literature. In this essay, Aubrey discusses how two books, Kate Millet's

Sexual Politics and
Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, influenced Churchill as she
developed the main themes of Cloud Nine.

Churchill has
stated in interviews that two of the books that influenced her writing of Cloud
Nine were Kate Millet's Sexual Politics and Frantz Fanon's Black
Skin, White Masks. Millett's book was published in 1970 and became
something of a bible for the emerging women's movement. Although today Sexual
Politics is less well known than the work of other feminists of the period,
such as Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem, it was in its time a revolutionary
work that awakened many American and European women to an awareness of the
nature of the patriarchal society in which they lived. Fanon was a...